The journey from the TCP/IP, the original Internet protocol suite designed by the US Department of Defense, to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web has seen the Internet develop beyond an information exchange in cyberspace to permeate all spheres of life. As an academic researching the cyber domain in the 2010s, I was greatly bemused by the epoch. Ambiguity prevailed among us with the primary debate being: which parts of the electromagnetic spectrum count as cyber. We were attempting to formulate policy in the absence of consensus on cyber’s fundamental parameters and the dichotomy was absurd! Yet, it was abundantly clear cyberspace would be embedded deeper in our lives. My senior colleague remarked at the time, “Cyberspace does not abolish time nor space; it makes positive and negative evolutionary forces more dangerous to ignore.” A decade later, here we are.

In his new book Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities, technologist David B. Auerbach rings the alarm on evolutionary forces he calls “meganets.” He endeavors to provide a compendium that enables us to contrast today with all of our yesterdays (the pre-internet world of 1985, the pre-Google world of 1995, and the pre-Facebook world of 2005) so we can foster greater understanding of where we are and how we got here—and glean necessary insights to temper “the commandeering forces’” of the future.

Auerbach is well-positioned to recognize the problems before us and offer remedies. The former software engineer at Microsoft and Google contributed to pivotal breakthroughs from instant messaging to the servers powering data stores. He currently teaches the history of computation at the New Centre for Research and Practice and his research includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Shakespeare. The author’s penchant for both computing and literature is evident, with each chapter title accompanied by a literary quote. He begins with the Bard of Avon’s King Lear, “Woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge of themselves.”

Auerbach posits at the start of his compendium, “To fix something, we must know how it is broken.” We should of course recognize there is a problem to start off with, and Auerbach earnestly informs readers that we do not. The digital forces Auerbach formally introduces us to have already been well-acquainted with us without our knowledge:

These meganets are fundamentally new combinations of huge numbers of people and enormous amounts of computational processing power. They evolve faster than we can track them. Their workings are opaque even to their administrators. And they irreversibly occupy our lives with an ongoing persistence that makes them inextricable from the fabric of society.

Meganets are semi-autonomous systems working beyond the control of humans and self-organizing into persistent, evolving, opaque forms. Regardless of whether a meganet uses heuristics or AI, these three fundamental characteristics remain. Auerbach rejects the mainstream perception of the internet as a model of unidirectional content production and consumption, writing, “The meganet relates its components to one another organically, mutably, and inextricably, joining them so that each component constantly transforms the others, which then transform it in turn.” The result is that neither corporations nor governments can alter the unstable nature of meganets, so Auerbach critically reframes the problem. He states it is not a lack of ethics nor will on the part of corporations. If we erroneously believe so, we seek solutions where none exist. The problem is systemic, insoluble, and process-centric—beyond our understanding.

Social networks are the most visible manifestation of meganets. You see, meganets are highly feedback-driven which explains their exponential growth in the age of voluminous data. Algorithms and users combine to create the fundamentals of volume, velocity, and virality where “velocity topples stability.” A decade ago, FarmVille, a highly addictive agriculture simulation game, was inundating Facebook users’ feeds as it embodied all three fundamentals—and it certainly was not the last. A tweet from Elon Musk in March 2021 instantly saw Bitcoin’s value rise by 17%. The innovator had such a swift effect because of the meganet. The “Gamestonk” phenomenon saw videogame retailer GameStop’s stock skyrocketing 1,500% overnight. Reddit forum WallStreetBets facilitated the coordination of individual amateur investors, helping the cult store escape the financial doldrums it had found itself in. In these and other cases, the meganet’s tendency to amplify the most voluminous, high-velocity, viral content was on full display.

Gamification of Life

Forget IPv6 with its IPv4 legacy issues, we are in the web3 realm: the multiverse has arrived (!) and the author predicts life is going to be increasingly “gamified.” The meganet’s capacity for quantitative assessment coupled with its ability to track and rank data shepherds people toward two kinds of activity—games and commerce. As Auerbach states, “Online gamers have known for twenty years what the rest of us are only learning now: once real money enters a virtual world and people invest their own wealth in the evolution of a game world, a meganet gains a new sphere of influence to spread its chaos.” The commodification of human association itself is the direction of travel, with the global economy turned into a massively networked game. Venezuela’s economic crisis saw citizens in 2017 turn to farming currency in games like RuneScape, as these unregulated virtual currencies were much more stable than the national currency. This in-country mining triggered hyperinflation in all the virtual economies to the ire of the rest of the global players. Virtual economies globalize both unregulated labor and inflation.

Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, currently embattled with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, is primarily to obtain its colossal World of Warcraft as part of its metaverse strategy. The MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) is one of the most successful of all time. Players trade and sell virtual goods such as weapons and mounts for significant amounts of real-world moolah. Its internal currency “gold” is created through repetitive tasks and the exchange of these items. Players worked out that literal mining in the game was a steady way to generate gold and thus sprung lucrative gold farms in countries like China. Workers could earn a living mining Warcraft gold: game-changing (literally)! Despite crackdown efforts, the in-game toy economy spilled outside of Warcraft’s Azeroth.

Blizzard’s woes pre-date farming—the infamous 2005 “Corrupted Blood” plague had already tested resolve. Designed to be a debuff (an effect to weaken the character) applied to top-tier players boss-fighting in the Zul’Gurub region, Corrupted Blood was transmissible to players in close proximity for four seconds. A loophole existed—players’ pets could also become infected. These creatures are routinely summoned and dismissed, and the plague thus spread to heavily populated areas, with the game requiring a hard reset to end it. Auerbach cautions that the distance between Corrupted Blood and a global financial meltdown is smaller than we think.

Auerbach believes blockchains and cryptocurrency are the apotheosis of the meganet as they guarantee decentralization and no total control by design. If a cryptocurrency meganet goes out of control, only mass coordinated action can limitedly counter it. The 2010 “value overflow incident” illustrates this, wherein a hacker exploited a bug and minted 185 billion Bitcoins. The community, small at the time, promptly reached a consensus and took action endorsed by pseudonymous Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto. A new software version was rolled out within hours and transactions that took place after the hack were invalidated. 2013’s “forking incident” further highlighted volatility. Though both chains did converge at block 225454, this incident was the closest the Bitcoin protocol came to failing.

Identity Mirages

Meganets are strengthening their grip on personal identity as they deepen their administration of our lives. A requirement for an enduring and unified online identity or “digital mirage” emerges and these must be authenticated and guaranteed. Auerbach affirms that the only entity equipped to truly provide identity assurance and management is the government. It alone can require citizens to provide accurate information and for this data to supersede that of private entities. The prototype for a governmental meganet has existed in India through the Aadhaar Scheme for over a decade.

I was in attendance at the microfinance conference in New Delhi where entrepreneur and chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Nandan Nilekani, unveiled the concept for the UID or the Aadhaar Scheme in 2010. There was a most pressing need to tackle financial exclusion and formulate strategies to increase access to financial services. This required the creation of a vibrant and comprehensive ecosystem supportive of financial inclusion, and the conference brought together stakeholders to provide input. Ideals were high-minded, rooted in helping the most economically disenfranchised in the largest democracy in the world. An array of financial services UID could facilitate were explored.

The unique 12-digit identification number went on to be issued to citizens and the single identifier for all government services linked to one government-administered database. The UID was accompanied with biometric identifiers and other data which cannot be duplicated. Auerbach states, “Aadhaar’s innate extensibility and agglomerative nature make it a meganet. No other form of ID carries with it the ability to grow limitlessly, accumulating more data on its users as more services are hooked up to it.” Aadhaar architect Ram Sewak Sharma has articulated what distinguishes the scheme from others:

The law protects every piece of information involved in using Aadhaar, with the use itself restricted by the Supreme Court. On the other hand, the social networks hoard every picture, every line of text and every mouse click and sell it for the equivalent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of many countries. In this respect, Aadhaar’s and OSN’s [online social networks] are as different from each other as chalk and cheese.

Auerbach contrasts Aadhaar with China’s Social Credit System (SCS). This is not built on the meganet model, its censors exist outside the systems they monitor which limit the effects of feedback. The system is designed to blacklist citizens who do not uphold defined social values of Chinese society. “Discredited” citizens and companies are punished, unable to purchase property, secure loans, or freely travel—social ostracism enforced digitally. Auerbach believes China’s inherent cultural values and emphasis on xiào shun or “filial piety” is so great that citizens approve of SCS. Therefore, the credibility risk of an out-of-control SCS is much greater to Beijing than an out-of-control Aadhaar is to New Delhi.

AI AI Captain

The locus of AI research has shifted from higher educational institutions to corporations as the latter provided the mammoth amounts of data needed. The recent hearings in Congress on Generative AI have brought to the fore concerns shared by educators and AI companies alike on the dangers of powerful unregulated AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposes the formation of a US or global agency with the authority to license the most powerful AI systems and ensure compliance with safety standards. Since its public release at the end of last year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, surpassing 1 billion users.

What will AI’s effect be on meganets? Auerbach believes they will supercharge them. AI’s impressive achievements in recent years include remarkable accuracy in recognizing faces and objects in images; and in its accuracy and speed of microbiological analyses of proteins, viruses, and genes. However, Auerbach feels we have been misled to think AI will rule the world when what it really does is make managing meganets more difficult.

Late AI pioneer Nils Nilsson spoke of pattern recognition as constructing separating boundaries in a multidimensional space of features. AI creates borders or fences for data classification based on what has been learned, to create a virtual landscape of examples. AI excels at pattern recognition but crucially does not understand nuance. Prior to the emergence of meganets, computers had the luxury of ignoring human language. Auerbach explains, “Language’s flexibility and ambiguity are anathema to computers, which computationally regiment all of their input data into well-specified and uniform boxes and then feed those categorizations back into their outputs.” Thus, meganets are uniquely ill-equipped to process language, preferring short, simplistic, and highly regularized lingua franca of popular terms and expressions. With their lack of competence for processing linguistic data, they will evolve towards that which avoids or minimizes human language. We already see this preference—numbers, taxonomies, images, and video already dominate the online realm. Auerbach provides a stark warning: the vitality of human language will decline with deeper meaning drained away. “Human homogeneity is the great algorithmic simplifier, and meganets have gained the presence and sway to encourage such homogeneity.”

Taming the Meganet

Auerbach believes that taming a complex ecosystem like a meganet is only possible if it becomes “error correcting” rather than “error multiplying.” He prescribes wide-scale methods to employ including chaos injection and soft social control. I shall not divulge further but Auerbach acknowledges these methods will seem to sow confusion and conflict across the internet. All approaches are focused on dampening aggressive feedback loops to prevent explosive and spontaneous anomalies from gaining traction. He concedes this is not without temporary risk to civil liberties, but it is the price paid to reduce their dangers. Chaos can neutralize chaos if directed in the opposite direction.

We know not whether you are kind,
Or cruel in your fiercer mood;
But be you Matter, be you Mind,
We think we know that you are blind,
And we alone are good.

Henry Adams, “Prayer to the Dynamo”

The concluding chapter begins with a stanza from Adams’ famed poem within a poem in his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Auerbach’s intentionality is clear to those familiar with the body of work. He shares Adams’ observations on technology as an infinite force and the question of control. Meganets ultimately cannot be controlled at the granular level nor simply turned off. With its mass participation and feedback loops, we are inextricably stuck with them.

Meganets will bring quantifiable monetary value to everything, with life relentlessly tallied, scored, and refereed. They will push for the unit of expression to no longer be the individual but the collective. Science Fiction warns of the “hive mind,” just think of the Borg. The age of meganets will be defined by the lack of individualism. Homogeneity and ultra-conformity will reign, with nuance and creativity under relentless attack.

Meganets will seek to erode our sense of scale, our control, and most desperately—specific meaning itself. Auerbach states his core motivations for writing the book:

What will happen when a generation stops worrying about the invasiveness, the chaos, the errors, and most of all the sheer lack of human knowledge brought to us by the incomprehensible scale of meganets? It may just leave the older generation nostalgic for a time of greater individuality and greater understanding of the world’s workings, but there’s also reason to believe that the meganet will not integrate itself as peacefully as these past revolutions. We may never stabilize.

How much human agency are we willing to cede? Auerbach’s compendium serves as a guide for humanity as we contend with technological forces that by design will endeavor to atrophy our language, ossify our thoughts, and curtail our liberty. Resistance is not futile, and we must ready ourselves.